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Thursday, 1 June 2017

As I descended the Playfair Steps towards the Scottish National Gallery after work, I first heard him before I saw him. He was asking for change, his voice weak, not particularly dishevelled, by the tear in his jacket and his trousers meant he was in rags.

I could not look away and I did not have loose change, I had decent money and an open hand, that was what I did as I secreted a note into his hand. He noticed and called after me to thank me and shake my hand.

That is the reality of life of some of my fellow Brits, they have nothing, not an inkling of where the next meal is coming from, not a place to sleep, not a prospect for a future beyond the now, if something radical does not happen from individuals like you and I, from civil society groups and fundamentally from the government and we are choosing one in a week.

Complex waffle at simple problems

On April the 30th after Theresa May decided to gamble with our lives by calling an unnecessary and unneeded general election, Andrew Marr posited that nurses were using food banks and this is what she said, “There are 'many complex reasons' why nurses were using food banks, but 'not having enough money to eat' was not one of them.” [Independent]

No Theresa, the reason why people use food banks does not involve any complex reason, it is a simple reason, they do not have the money to buy food. Full Stop!

This whole preoccupation with #Brexit, ‘Strong and Stable’ and whatever rhetorical mantra that has become a cacophonous jumble of the governing party in the mouth of Theresa May, does not once address these fundamental issues.

Why are people sleeping rough everywhere I go in the UK and why are nurses using food banks and what are you going to do about it?

She can’t do it, simples

These events are fundamentally the bread and butter issues that keep people on the lowest rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, they have basic needs now, the psychological needs and the self-fulfilment needs are hardly on their minds. #Brexit is not front and centre of their minds.

With a 7-year term as first Home Secretary and now Prime Minister, Theresa May has had the scope, opportunity and privilege to implement many of the new promises she is trotting out as electoral pledges and failed dismally as achieving any, be it on immigration or social policy. What she could not do then, she has not done now and will not do hereafter, let us not be carried away and cajoled by this political talk.

Theresa May is completely out of touch with the pulse and the heart of what ails the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, she is just on an opportunistic jaunt projected on a #Brexit negotiating stance in the hope that we are scared enough to trust her.

#Fuck Brexit

Now, negotiating #Brexit is important, but at the expense of national real life issues that affect everyday lives is where the Tories campaign gets it wrong and much as the prospect of Jeremy Corben as Prime Minister is a hard concept to countenance, I dare say, he knows where people are hurting, needing and ailing – in social welfare, in services, in making the country work for everyone, even if it would hurt some of us to help the people who appear to have been left behind or forgotten altogether.

Whilst, I commend Amber Rudd for standing in for the Prime Minister at the debates just two days after she lost her father, I sympathise, but politics is about the living, I have no sympathy vote to give, I have a vote that makes a difference in my life and the lives of others that I see as I walk the streets of the UK.

I say it as it needs to be said – Fuck #Brexit, there is more to life than that at stake.

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I have many stories to tell, I am English of Nigerian parentage, I lived in the Netherlands for 12 years, returned to the UK recently but still have wander lust - the rest is somewhere online, most likely in on blogs.